Canadian Soldiers returning from the trenches during the Battle of the Somme, November 1916. /Credit: W.I. Castle/Library and Archives Canada

The exhibit, which opens on Remembrance Day, attempts to capture the thoughts and prayers of soldiers from a century ago, said Caitlin Bailey, curator and executive director of the CCGW.

Bailey said the exhibition features “poignant personal letters,” which represented the only contact some soldiers had with their families and friends during the four years of the conflict (1914-18).

“Letter-writing was extremely important for Canadian soldiers,” she said. “It was the main form of communication with the people they left behind. That was how they knew their families were still there, and that was how they knew they had something to come home to.”

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“Soldiers wrote of the conditions on the front, their thoughts of home, and their emotions at losing those who fought with them,” said Bailey.

Letter-writing was extremely important for Canadian soldiers. That was how they knew their families were still there, and that was how they knew they had something to come home to.

Letter from Major C. Fred Ritchie to a friend, October 6 1916. /Courtesy: CCGW

The overriding sentiment that comes through in many of the letters is “one of trying very hard to maintain a sense of reality of life. And trying to talk about very normal mundane things, like eating and the weather, things unrelated to war. And they asked questions about people they knew back home.”

Some of the letters speak of terrible loss and sadness from the horrors of trench warfare, Bailey added.

“After the Somme Battle and Regina Trench, the soldiers are mourning the loss of their brightest and best, and also trying to make sense of why they were alive and others were not,” she said. “There was a very fatalistic attitude. There was this idea that nothing really, not rhyme nor reason, explained why someone might survive and another wouldn’t.”

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So far I have been lucky enough to come through it. I said luck, but what I mean is that by the grace of God, as I can’t otherwise understand how anyone ever came out of it alive.

Bailey refers to a letter sent by Major C. Ritchie of Montreal to a friend after the Battle of Thiepval Ridge in 1916.

Ritchie writes: “So far I have been lucky enough to come through it. I said luck, but what I mean is that by the grace of God, as I can’t otherwise understand how anyone ever came out of it alive.”

Bailey said the letters are not as patriotic in tone as one might think. Instead, they reveal the humanity of those who fought for Canada.

“Our main goal is for people to come away with a sense of the humanity of these people. That they were doing their best in terrible, terrible situations that they hadn’t really signed up for,” Bailey explained. “The letters were not desperate or panicked, because they didn’t want their loved ones to be frightened for them.”

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In one such letter, Pte. Estee Tully Weaver writes to his girlfriend, Grace Gower, Feb. 6, 1918: “I am writing (or rather scribbling) in the bunkhouse this evening. The boy’s (sic) are playing ‘Montoon’ a card game that is very popular in this hut.”

In another letter dated Aug. 7, 1918, Lt.-Col. Royal Ewing writes to his brother Stuart after taking over the battalion for someone who had died. “We are now bivouacked awaiting to take part in what will probably be one of the greatest shows in the war,” Ewing wrote on the eve of the Battle of Amiens. “You will hear all about it long before this (letter) reaches you.”

The Writing Home exhibit opens Nov. 11 at the Canadian Centre for the Great War in Montreal, 5524 St-Patrick St., Suite 202,and online at www.greatwarcentre.com.

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